Book Review

A Fierce Green Fire: The U.S. Environmental Movement Past and Present

A Fierce Green Fire

By Phillip Shabecoff

New York: Hill and Wang, 1993

352 pp., $10.95

Reviewed by Tarek Milleron

U.S. ENVIRONMENTALISM, once the domain of a few fierce naturalists,
now impacts nearly every citizen’s life. What began with a focus on simple
conservation grew to include health and safety, pollution and ozone destruction.
Environmental issues pervade modern society. Phillip Shabecoff, in his
book A Fierce Green Fire, unearths the crucibles of U.S. environmentalism,
dissects its modern role and ponders its near future.

Shabecoff opens with a description of the United States as it
stood in virtual pristine splendor under Native American stewardship just
prior to the European invasion. Fortune seekers accompanied the community-minded
to the new world, both with tools to conquer: technology and disease. After
briefly documenting 200 years of European expansion into a land of seemingly
inexhaustible bounty, Shabecoff turns to the intellectual birth of U.S.
environmentalism.

The early conservationists of the nineteenth century, Thoreau, Emerson
and George Perkins Marsh among others, while visionary (especially the
widely-travelled Marsh, who had a twentieth century grasp of the human
impact on nature), did not have much effect on policy. Conservation victories,
such as California’s preservation of Yosemite, were few. Most land use
policies meant giveaways to industry; the corrupt General Land Office,
for example, gave 160 million acres to the railroads and accelerated timber
giveaways in the West toward the end of the century.

Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency was the first major respite from
the country’s historic wanton squandering of natural resources. In 1908,
Roosevelt called the White House Conference on Conservation, marking a
radical departure from his predecessors’ failure to take conservation concerns
seriously. Yet even the young conservation movement was divided. Shabecoff
lists four facets: the romantic love of nature best personified by John
Muir; Gifford Pinchot’s tenets of efficient and wise resource use; Roosevelt
and Pinchot’s emphasis on the democratic underpinnings of the commonwealth;
and the growing awareness of threats to human health by industrial processes.
Not until Rachel Carson did a popular and integrative environmental ethic
coalesce.

Shabecoff depicts the development of environmentalism as moving
in fits and starts until the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring
in 1962. Twentieth century environmental history, as Shabecoff presents
it, has been punctuated by periods of environmental action that left indelible
legislative, intellectual and spiritual legacies; yet nineteenth century
tendencies to ignore the abuse of nature have persisted. Mixed with the
conservation efforts of FDR, the teachings of Aldo Leopold and the explosion
of environmental concern in the 1960s and 1970s, have been the Hardings,
"giveaway McKays" (Eisenhower’s Interior Secretary), and the Reagan-Bush
environmental meat grinder.

Ronald Reagan attempted nothing less than the decapitation of
environmental protection in the United States. Shabecoff concisely discusses
the actor’s eight-year environmental pillage, calling the Reagan approach
"an odd amalgam of libertarianism and corporate socialism." James Watt
and Anne Gorsuch were the most notorious Reagan appointees, but they were
just the most visible. Reagan appointed a rancher to head the Bureau of
Land Management, a building contractor to head the Occupational Health
and Safety Administration and allowed industry lawyers to be environmental
prosecutors. Perhaps the most depraved was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture
John Crowell, formerly of Louisiana Pacific, who sold millions of board
feet of ancient timber in the Tongass National Forest for a few dollars
per tree.

Shabecoff’s review of Reagan is all the more devastating coming
after four chapters describing first the post-Carson revolution and its
landmark legislation on land, wildlife and global issues. While he quickly
debunks George Bush’s self-projected environmental image, Shabecoff does
not discuss Bush’s presidency as piercingly as he does Reagan’s. The autocratic
butchershop of the Office of Management and Budget was certainly as devastating
to environmental regulations under Bush as under Reagan, and Dan Quayle’s
rabidly anti-environment Council on Competitiveness deserves more than
one line. Bush did sign the Clean Air Act of 1990, but only after carving
it up into a shell of its predecessor; this legislation also deserves more
discussion than Shabecoff gives it.

Journeying through time, Shabecoff finally focuses his attention
on present-day environmentalism. Here, the author’s work departs from mere
history and turns a critical eye on the cutting edge. Shabecoff criticizes
those environmentalists who have discovered that they could drive BMWs
and still claim the environmental mantle, adopting a virtual platform of
negotiating with industry. He looks more favorably on those who have harkened
back to John Muir’s moral stamina or a more open, democratic approach.
Shabecoff emphasizes the relevance of social justice to environmental issues
and the local battles, such as those over incinerators, that inspire whole
communities to action in struggles that draw no lines between environmentalism
and concern for justice.

In light of Shabecoff’s generally hard-hitting account, several
omissions are noteworthy. The author does not mention the most obvious
failure of U.S. environmental regulation: massive polluting by the federal
government. There is no discussion of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade, which threatens to sharply diminish citizen control over the
commonwealth. Most surprising is the dearth of insight Shabecoff offers
into the role of the press. More than one environmental project has lost
steam simply because Shabecoff or reporters from the Washington Post or
Associated Press did not attend a news conference intended to convey important
information to the public. The pivotal role played by key members of the
press simply highlights the lack of citizen-to-citizen communication on
national issues.

Locally-generated environmentalism has always been strong in the
United States. Thoreau knew Walden. Shabecoff tells of California farmers
who rose up against the hydraulic mining that flooded their communities
in the nineteenth century. People fight local environmental battles for
decades.

Shabecoff ends his book wondering if environmentalism will permeate
our institutions, economic systems and social relationships. Can national
environmentalism attain the integrity of local activism? Those who share
his optimistic projection would do well to heed Shabecoff’s call to integrate
social justice and environmental issues.